I could use some assistance please. I've only had an iPad for a while and find that I want a computer I can sit down at to type stuff up. Mainly I need to get my resume updated and also remembered how many forms I had to fill out and upload from when I got my last job, and I decided doing all of that is probably too much of a hassle from my iPad. I don't particularly have a budget except I would prefer to spend the lowest amount possible and get the cheapest thing I can right now. I mean, I could afford something nice, but I've been out of work since last Feb (by my own choice) and probably shouldn't be throwing around too much money after this long; once I get hired, I'm gonna need to be able to afford to move (I'm shooting for a job on the West Coast; I'm currently in the South East).
So earlier I went to Target and bought an HP notebook that is on sale this week. It's also a tax-free weekend here, to prepare for back-to-school, so I figured why not if it's tax free (picked up an HP printer to go with it too)? It was extremely cheap, $179 down from $199.
Here is that laptop I got. Like I said, pretty cheap. It only has 4GB on RAM and a 32GB HDD. So obviously I'm not expecting it to be a powerhouse. I looked up a lot of reviews there and elsewhere and the common thing I saw was that it was very slow. That doesn't surprise me, with such low RAM and a small HDD that is probably filled with bloat from the manufacturer.
I've been using an iPad as my primary computer since mid-2015 but prior to that all of the laptops I owned were old as hell and had XP on them. I do actually have a laptop set up in my apartment right now but I haven't turned it on in months. The LCD matrix went bad so everything on the screen is super-fuzzy, it is bogged down with malware, the HDD is almost full, everything is out-of-date, and it has Windows XP on it. In addition to my current poor computer situation with that shitty XP laptop, I just spent 3 1/2 years working at a remote location in the Arctic using computers that were running Windows 7, had super-slow internet that was worse than the minimum speeds Internet can be to be called broadband (because we were going over a satellite link and VPN back to a base in the US), and were so locked down by the admins that we could barely do our time cards or other work-related things because a ton of stuff was out of date and it didn't run Java well and we had to use either Explorer or a broken version of Firefox.
So this new HP is probably better than those situations. If it is just "slower than all the other new computers out there," then I can handle that. But if it is "so slow that using it for simple tasks becomes frustrating," then that isn't gonna be good. Like I said, I only really need it to do some word processing, editing some documents, and that sort of thing. I don't need to watch movies on it. I'll do some web-browsing on it maybe if my iPad is dead or something, beyond the stuff I'll need to do for resume work online, maybe some school work if I start some classes soon. I'll maybe download iTunes so I can sync my wife's phone up to it to pull pictures off and add them to an external or a thumb drive (she's running out of space on her phone but won't delete pics). I don't play PC games (I'm 30 and don't even have a Steam account). That said, if this thing would possibly run
VASSAL, that would be absolutely excellent because I'd love to download the X-Wing Miniatures Game module so I could play it at times when I can't get a physical tabletop game of it going (and I'd probably wanna play some other tabletop games on there as well, if I could). Tabletop Simulator would be awesome to run but from what I've read, 4gigs of RAM won't be enough for a lot of heavy tabletop game modules, so that is probably out of the question.
How bad of a buy did I make here? I know it isn't a great laptop, or even good probably, but is this like the worst thing I could have possibly bought? I imagine it will meet the basic "I need to use Microsoft Word" purposes, but is it still going to wind up being frustrating to use and so slow that I hate it and wish I hadn't bought it? It's still in the box right now; I wanted to get an idea of how bad it could be from some tech-savvy people before I opened it. If I should just open it and use it, I can set it up this weekend and get going. If consensus is that I should not have bought it and that it is complete garbage, then I suppose I can return it. I suppose a Chromebook or something would have met my needs but I would like to run VASSAL if I can, and I know that is probably easiest for me to figure out how to do on a standard Windows-based system.
So any advice, recommendations, criticisms? It went on sale on Sunday and I've put off asking around online since then, because I'm kind of ashamed at my computer dumbness (I actually used to know a lot about computers and building them and maintenance way back in high school but somehow I pushed all of that knowledge out of my head a long time ago). I was in the city doing some shopping though and the sale ends tomorrow, so I figured I should buy it now and then figure it out. I appreciate any feedback.
